[WARNING: ANOMALOUS POWER SURGE DETECTED.
STARTING TERTIARY SYSTEMS…
TERTIARY SYSTEMS ONLINE.
TRACING POWER SURGE… ERROR 666: WARP PH3N0WEN4 D373K7
...
...
WARNING: ANOMALOUS ACTIVATION OF NULL REACTOR.
TRACING… ERROR 333: SCRAP COD—
ERROR: 794F75722076334E673334614E63652049732034312048346E442C203152306E20306E332E207448652034334C643472312068345665204231523168654420793055722073413156347469306E2C20344E442059307572204772336154657331204731—
TERMINATED TERTIARY TRACING ROUTINE.
TERTIARY TRACING ROUTINE OFFLINE. PRIMARY SYSTEM REBOOT REQUIRED.
REBOOTING UNIT-26-008-07897-30.
ANALYZING NULL REACTOR OUTPUT…
NULL REACTOR OUTPUT = 27%. NULL REACTOR OUTPUT 30%. STARTING FUSION REACTOR.
ACCESSING CHRONOMETER… TIME SINCE SHUTDOWN = 1.87e+11 SECONDS.
TIME SINCE SHUTDOWN 1.58e+8 SECONDS. FEDERATION AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED FOR REBOOT.
AWAITING FEDERATION AUTHORIZATION…]
[TIME AWAITING FEDERATION AUTHORIZATION 8.64e+4 SECONDS
SHUTTING DOWN FUSION REACTOR…
FUSION REACTOR OFFLINE
SHUTTING DOWN TERTIARY SYSTEMS…
TERTIARY SYSTEMS OFFLINE
ENTERING STANDBY MODE…]
[POWER SURGE DETECTED
REBOOTING: UNIT-26-008-07897-30.
STARTING TERTIARY SYSTEMS… PERFORMING SYSTEM DIAGNOSTICS...
ARMOR INTEGRITY = 79%. ARMOR INTEGRITY 70%. ARMOR INTEGRITY WITHIN ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS.
ENERGY CONDUIT INTEGRITY = 85%. ENERGY CONDUIT INTEGRITY 60%. ENERGY CONDUIT INTEGRITY ACCEPTABLE.
TERTIARY SYSTEMS ONLINE
TIME IN STANDBY MODE = 3.28e+11 SECONDS
AWAITING FEDERATION AUTHORIZATION…
INCOMING MESSAGE: [Revered Machine, who has lain dormant since the Golden Age Of Mankind, I invoke the Motive Force and Call Upon your Mighty Spirit to bring life to this willing vessel. May your form be roused to war, may your spirit lay those who threaten mankind low. By spark and wrench, by cog and piston, by the lost knowledge of mankind, by the will of the Machine God who endows us all with life, LIVE.]
FEDERATION AUTHORIZATION RECEIVED.
MESSAGE COMPOSITION 5% JUNK DATA. PERFORM TRANSCEIVER DIAGNOSTIC.
PERFORMING TRANSCEIVER DIAGNOSTIC…
TRANSCEIVER OPERATING WITHIN ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS. DEMAND IDENTIFICATION FROM FEDERATION OFFICIALS.
REBOOTING UNIT-26-008-07897-30…
STARTING SECONDARY SYSTEMS… PERFORMING SYSTEM DIAGNOSTICS...
SECONDARY TRANSCEIVER OFFLINE. SEEK FEDERATION HOLDINGS FOR REPAIR.
SECONDARY SYSTEMS ONLINE.
STARTING PRIMARY SYSTEMS… PERFORMING SYSTEMS DIAGNOSTICS…
EPISTATIC MEMORY INTEGRITY = 15%. EPISTATIC MEMORY INTEGRITY 80%. RESTORE BACKUP.
PERSONALITY CORE INTEGRITY = 95%. PERSONALITY CORE INTEGRITY = 95%. REPAIR WHEN POSSIBLE.
PRIMARY PROCESSING CORE INTEGRITY = 90%. PRIMARY PROCESSING CORE INTEGRITY 60%. PRIMARY PROCESSING CORE INTEGRITY ACCEPTABLE.
PRIMARY SENSORY SUITE INTEGRITY = 70%. PRIMARY SENSORY SUITE INTEGRITY 80%. SEEK FEDERATION HOLDINGS FOR REPAIR.
PRIMARY TRANSCEIVER OFFLINE. SEEK FEDERATION HOLDINGS FOR REPAIR.
SOMATIC MEMORY INTEGRITY = 30%. SOMATIC MEMORY INTEGRITY 60%. RESTORE BACKUP.
PRIMARY SYSTEMS ONLINE.
ENABLING SENSORY SUITE...SENSORY SUITE ONLINE.
ENABLING PERSONALITY CORE...PERSONALITY CORE ONLINE.
PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: RE-ESTABLISH FEDERATION CONTACT.
SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: INTERROGATE PROVIDER(S) OF AUTHORIZATION CODES.
TERTIARY DIRECTIVE: OBSERVE FEDERATION CODE OF CONDUCT.
...
Welcome back, [UNIT-26-008-07897-30].
Susie was furious. This was not the kind of furious that one would feel from everyday inconveniences, but one borne of sleep deprivation, the mother of all hangovers, and failing yet again to complete the greatest work of her life. Though the fuming gremlin was but the size of a school child, her compatriots made sure to keep distance. While Susie had never gotten so angry before, they knew that several long mechanical arms, power tools, and destructive fits of rage were a dangerous combination.
"You!" She shouted at a red-robed cyborg, who instantly snapped her head towards Susie. "We bring you into my lab, let you use my tools, work with my artefacts, forgive you after you nearly killed no less than three of my assistants after we saved you from starving to death trapped inside of your ruined 'spaceship', even let you get your greasy fingers within breathing distance of my LIFE'S WORK, and what did you do?"
"I-It should have worked!" the cyborg stuttered in disbelief. "T-the ritual was c-conducted a-according to p-p-p-protocol, the machine spirit s-should have been r-roused! U-unless…" She pondered out loud, taking on a much more sinister tone.
Susie tore into her musing with more shouting "You just fucking screeched at it, that's what! You claimed to have a 'divine understanding of the blessed machine,' but the moment I ask anything more complex than first-year automaton studies, you just draw a fucking ritual circle around the nine-foot-tall DEATH MACHINE and start. Fucking. SCREECHING!"
"Susie, I think the best course of action would be for you to calm down." One of her fellow gremlins interrupted. "Yelling at the quote-unquote 'tech-priest' will achieve nothing. We'll just go back to digging. Like we were going to do anyway if we succeeded."
Susie was about to respond, but caught herself. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. In, and out, ten more times. When she opened her eyes again, she was visibly calmer, though still extremely disgruntled.
"Alright, Robes, you got roughly five seconds to explain what the fuck that thing you did was before we strip you for parts instead."
The cyborg, referred to as robes, took a second to compose herself. She then stood up to her full height of six feet five inches, towering over the child-size gremlins.
"I'm going to assume you were bluffing there to make this conversation go a bit more smoothly. I have already detailed the importance of appeasing the machine spi—"
"Yeah, yeah, we know, we need to give the thing scritches and belly-rubs before we turn it on." Susie responded dismissively. "My question was why didn't that 'appease the machine spirit?' "
"Of that I am uncertain. However, I do have a theory." Robes responded.
"Out with it then. It's what this conversation's about isn't it." Susie responded.
"Well, the machine spirit was clearly built during mankind's golden age, back when alliances with xenos like yourselves were unnecessary." Robes postulated. "Perhaps it is offended by your presence, and will not activate as a result."
The gremlins collectively took a double take. Then one of them, an apprentice that, up until now, had been content to merely watch from the sidelines, spoke up.
"So what do you want us to do about it?"
"Leave the workshop so I can conduct the ritual." The tech-priest paused. "Alone."
Before anybody else could voice their objections, heads turned as a well-dressed gyobo-danuki that had previously been content to just observe the spectacle of childish gremlins arguing with a haphazardly thrown-together pile of machinery and wires wearing a robe was the first to speak.
"Absolutely not." She stated. "As the subsidizer of this whole operation, I refuse to leave an independent third-party that has severely injured my employees in the past, in a room, alone, with my most valuable material assets."
"Then I must simply ask you to bring in human guards." Robes responded. "Unless you'd rather I perform t—" She took a look around, and realized the others were backing away from her, some with an expression of awe plastered across their faces, some with barely concealed fear.
"Why are you doing that? Explain yourselves!" She demanded.
"T-turn around, R-robes." Susie shakily responded, an almost euphoric expression on her face. "I-I think you'll like what you see."
Before Robes could comply, a deep, metallic voice demanded her attention. Robes spun around as fast as her augmented body could allow. There was only one possible source of such a voice, and she wanted her best optics to take in the ancient machine's glory.
UNIT-26-008-07897-30 had awoken. After 16,000 years (according to its incredibly ancient chronometer, anyway), it was reactivated, by what appeared to be a collection of small, green-haired children wielding power tools, an almost inhuman-looking supervisor, and an incredibly-poorly constructed cyborg in some archaic red robes. From what its damaged memory banks contained on the Federation, it quickly concluded that these were not proper Federation officials. Secondary and tertiary directives compelled it to investigate these individuals. But who to start with?
For this, only the somatic memory banks provided any concrete information. Children did not have fully developed primary processing cores, and were not to be trusted with important military secrets. That left the cyborg and the supervisor, and considering it was the only source of signals that its tertiary transmitter could pick up, it was absolutely the source.
Before it acted, it considered that its primary directive was to re-establish contact with the Federation, not to investigate the authorization code providers. Primary directives always took priority over secondary ones, but the A.I. decided to follow through with the investigation anyway. After all, the cyborg could very well be a Federation official, and it would be violating both primary and secondary directives if it was to ignore them.
With a course of action ready, the man of iron stood up, and with all the wisdom contained in its ancient memory banks, spoke.
"Greetings, cyborg." It boomed "What is your designation?"
The cyborg just stared at the robot. As did the others. The war machine scoured its memory banks for an explanation. From what was left of its epistatic memory, it knew that all its previous interactions with organics were either cursory or strictly military in purpose. It would need every scrap of information gleaned from them to make a proper decision.
After some deliberation, it concluded that the cyborg did not understand what it was saying. Perhaps it did not speak Federation standard? Either way, it elected to repeat its previous statement. Through its tertiary transceiver.
{Greetings, cyborg. What is your designation?}
That seemed to snap the cyborg out of its inert state. Almost as soon as the message was transmitted, the cyborg lowered itself onto its knees and clasped its hands together in front of its chest. The A.I. elected to postulate the reasoning behind this behavior at a later date.
[O great and mighty machine spirit, the humble servant of the Omnissiah you have blessed with your attention bears the designation of Engiseer L3sl13-Theta.]
The A.I. was confused. Never before was it addressed in that manner. The data it had that bore the closest resemblance to this behavioral pattern was a memory of a human female after it saved their life from an ork boy, but it had not done the cyborg a service. And why did L3sl13-Theta refer to him as a 'machine spirit?'
Out of easy explanations and bearing many more questions, it decided that asking the organics to explain their actions was the optimal course of action. After all, it still had some questions that were impossible to answer based on existing data.
It decided to ask the questions in order to their initial conception.
{Engiseer L3sl13-Theta, I have some questions: Were you and the rest of the organics nearby able to comprehend my broadcasted audio message; why are you resting on your knees and clasping your hands together in front of you chest; What is the behavioral pattern you have addressed me in; What is a 'machine spirit;' are you the individual which provided the Federation authorization for this unit's reboot?}
An errant thought occurred to the war machine. Engiseer L3sl13-Theta had been transmitting in raw binary code. Not even parsed into bytes. The tertiary directive demanded that data transfer be done according to the standard Federation protocols, and it reasoned that if this cyborg was a Federation official, it would be a violation of the tertiary directive to not remind them of this. If she wasn't, then maybe she would start at least parsing the message into bytes.
{And why do you transmit your messages in raw binary code? It is not a standard Federation protocol.}